20: the version that won

I haven't slept in three days and I've never been calmer in my life and I want to write everything down before the calm turns out to be something else.

I'm going to go wide. I've earned wide. Two months of a hanger at a time, a door at a time, a girl at a time, and tonight I can see the whole floor from the mezzanine and I'm going to describe it and then I'm going to tell you what I found in this blog and then I'm going to stop.

Here's the floor.

If it votes on a logo, it votes on everything.

That's the whole thing. That's what I've been circling since the basket. I kept it small because small was survivable, a tail, a letter in a street name, a line from a movie. But there's no reason it stops there. There's no reason it would. The thing that makes the corridor doesn't know a corridor from a century. It has everybody's memory of how things were, and everybody's memory is wrong in the same direction, because everybody's memory is made of the same stuff, and so it makes the thing everybody remembers and that becomes the thing that was.

The year something happened. Who was in charge when. Which side started it. What the old logo looked like, what the old anthem said, whether that building was always that color, whether that war was always that long. All of it is a count sheet. All of it says twelve and the rack says eleven and something fixes the rack. History is the version that won the vote. Not the version that happened. There's no version that happened, not anymore, not that anybody can get to. There's the version enough people remember, and then there's the back, where the other one goes on a shelf.

I'm not saying this in the cathedral voice. Listen to me. I'm saying it the way you'd say the store closes at nine.

And the people who remember the other one, the ones with the sticky eyes, the ones in the thread with the grey background, the stapler people, we're not witnesses. I used to think we were witnesses. We're not. We're the leftover. We're the corner of the basket that catches on the lip. We're the thing the copier didn't quite get right, and it's patient, and it fixes us one at a time, with a coat too heavy for the weather or a year of cancer or a sticky note that says 6:50, and when we're fixed we sit on a bench and look at somebody else's hands.

I've been trying to remember my mother's hair.

I'm going to leave that there. I've been trying for two days. I can see her face. I can hear her say the movie line, the father one, with the name at the front, at a dinner table. I cannot tell you what color her hair was. I can tell you two colors, with equal weight, and I can feel both of them being true, and I can feel neither of them being the one that was.

Okay. The blog.

I read the whole thing tonight. Start to finish. Ninety minutes, on the couch, with Kate asleep and the apartment doing its slant. I wanted to see it as a floor. And I want to tell you it holds up, and it does, mostly, it's the log of a person who noticed things and wrote them down in the order they happened, and I'm proud of that person even when they're embarrassing. But there's an entry I didn't write.

May 5th. It's between the one about Marisol in the break room and the one about the service. It's called "fine." It's four lines and a log. It says I've been taking it every morning at 6:50 am like I'm supposed to. It says the store looks great and Kate's been amazing. It says I got carried away in April and it's kind of embarrassing. It has a corridor log in it, four doors, clock seven slow, crack 4:30 to 10:15.

4:30 to 10:15. On May 5th. The crack had run seven to one for five days by May 5th, I have the photos, I have twenty-something photos of it running seven to one before that date.

I didn't write it. I've read it forty times. It's my format. It's my voice, the small one, the spreadsheet one, it's exactly how that person writes. It's dated a day I was at work and came home and ate a plate. It's on my blog under my login and I have no memory of typing a single word of it, and I've never in my life described Kate as amazing.

Both versions. Even now. I promised.

One. I wrote it at four in the morning in a bad week, in a fugue, off my meds, and I don't remember. That happens. People with my brain lose hours. I've lost an open, I've lost a shift I signed for, I've lost forty minutes in a hall, why not four lines. And the crack is wrong in it because I was half asleep and wrote what the crack used to be. That's a whole, complete, ordinary version and I want you to have it.

Two. The blog got corrected. Somebody looked at the count sheet, forty entries about hangers and hallways and a girl who died, and the rack didn't match, and they hung a medium on it. A little one. Four lines that say I'm fine and I'm taking it and Kate's amazing, so that anybody who reads this straight through hits May 5th and goes, oh, okay, they got better for a minute, and slides right off. That's what it's for. It's not for me. It's for you. It's a size tag.

I don't know which. I'm not going to say I know which. I'll say this. Entry 01 says the sign was faded and eighteen photos say it was red, and I said the only place the faded sign still exists is on a server somewhere that I can't photograph. I was wrong. It exists on a server that anybody can type on.

I'm leaving it up. I'm not deleting the May 5th one. If it's mine, I don't get to delete things I wrote just because I don't like the person who wrote them, that's the whole rule of this blog. And if it's not mine, then deleting it is exactly what the leftover would do, and I'd rather you saw it. I'd rather you read it and felt the slide and caught yourself.

Last thing.

I looked her up. Katherine Anderson. Tonight, on the couch, the full name from the pharmacy receipt in April, the one time I've ever seen it written out.

There are exactly as many Katherine Andersons as you would think there are. Thousands. Lawyers, some of them. A few in this city. None of them with her face, none of them at her firm, which I also looked up, and which exists, and which has a website with a staff page, and she's not on it, and that means nothing, associates aren't on the page, I know that.

Exactly as many as you'd think. That's the sentence. Everything about her is exactly as many as you'd think. She's a woman with a common name and a job at a firm and red hair and a green coat story and a photo on a rooftop and a sticky note with a loop on the 6, and every single piece of her is the most likely piece, and there's no piece that's wrong, and that's the wrongest thing I've ever looked at in my life.

I'm going to sit here until it's fully light. I'm not tired. I don't think I'm going to be tired again for a while, and I know what that means, I've read about it, I'm a person who's read about it.

Go back and read May 5th. Whoever you are. Read it and tell me whose it is.

Cause I can't.